Liberal hopefuls vie to become Premier of Toronto, er, Ontario

The candidates to become the next Premier of Ontario have taken their cue from the departing one and spoken about the prospects of Liberal renewal at every step.

Eric Hoskins, the Toronto MPP who will make formal his leadership bid on Tuesday morning, described it not as a leadership bid but as “an important announcement about renewal in the Ontario Liberal Party.”

That statement came shortly after Glen Murray, another leadership candidate, issued a release that outlined his platform. “My plan is for renewal,” it said off the top.

A few hours after that, Greg Sorbara, the former MPP and current party executive, held a press conference at Queen’s Park in which he spoke repeatedly of the great opportunities for renewal that this contest presents.

“It will be a chance to hear new ideas, new proposals, new policies for this great province,” Mr. Sorbara said to a clutch of reporters.

But with only a week-and-half to go before the entry deadline, and the deadline for campaigns to sign up new members to the provincial party, it looks like renewal, in terms of this race, is so far little more than a catchphrase.

With the entry of Dr. Hoskins, a physician and former director of War Child Canada, on Tuesday morning, there will be six declared candidates in the race. Of those, four were members of Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet at the moment he announced plans to step down last month. A fifth, Sandra Pupatello, was a cabinet minister for eight years and a Liberal MPP for 16 years. The sixth, Gerard Kennedy, was a decade-long MPP and a three-year cabinet minister during Mr. McGuinty’s first term. This still qualifies him as a relative outsider, which says a lot. He served as a Liberal at the provincial and federal levels for close to 15 years and previously ran, unsuccessfully, for the leadership of both parties. Yet: Gerard Kennedy, Liberal outsider.

Perhaps more troubling for party supporters is that of the six candidates, only Ms. Pupatello, who represented Windsor West as an MPP, is not from the Toronto area (and yet she’s returning to politics from a stint with a Bay Street firm). Mr. McGuinty’s successive majority governments were reduced to a minority last year largely because the Liberals have cratered outside urban areas; rebuilding support outside Toronto would seem like a key part of any renewal plan. But the candidates for leader can be plotted on a map that ranges from Windsor in the west to only the Don Valley in the east and, er, the Don Valley in the north.

Liberal fortunes in rural areas have only eroded since the 2011 vote, after the government whacked funding for the horse-racing industry and the gas-plant affair blew up, exacerbating beliefs that Liberals only cared about voters in urban ridings. Meanwhile, a recent decision to postpone the conversion of a coal-fired plant in Thunder Bay has angered local politicians and, coming after the unpopular cancellation of regular train service to the far north of the province, threatens to sap any strength the party has left in that region. The mayor of Thunder Bay complained to a local paper that the Liberal-created provincial power authority “doesn’t know where Thunder Bay is, to tell you the truth.”

It’s in this environment, then, that the Liberals will choose a new leader, in Toronto, in a process likely to have a disproportionate amount of Toronto-area delegates. Each riding will send 16 delegates, but a laundry list of “ex officio” delegates drawn from former candidates, party activists and student leaders are also eligible to participate. Those delegates would be expected to mostly come from the party’s stronghold, but with the leadership convention coming on a late January weekend, travel to Toronto from the province’s outer regions could be difficult. It all points to a selection process skewed toward the one place where the Liberals are relatively strong, and away from those places where they need to grow.

On the policy side, Mr. Kennedy is the only candidate to so far offer a rebuke of the McGuinty agenda. Of the Liberals’ hard line taken against unions, he told the Toronto Star, “I wasn’t at those tables, I didn’t vote for those things. I won’t need legislation to solve problems with teachers or other public servants,” and explained he would use “goodwill” to set things right with what used to be the party’s labour base. How he would accomplish that is less clear: it’s not goodwill the unions are seeking, it’s the chance to reject the government’s strict bargaining terms.

But if Mr. Kennedy manages to shake things up even a little, that will be a boon to the competition. No one needs two more months of vague renewal talk.